Date Rape

Legislation Sought To Combat Under-reported Crime

WASHINGTON — Nicole Snow, a 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate, was raped before her junior year in high school by a football player she had been dating for a month.

Christine Shunk of Coatesville, Pa., was raped as a college freshman six years ago by a friend who had offered to walk her home from a party. Instead of advising her to contact the police, a college counselor told Shunk she should transfer to another school.

Both women recently told their stories before the Senate Judiciary Committee to dramatize the prevalence of ``acquaintance rape`` and the need for measures proposed by the panel`s chairman, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), to combat violence against women.

``Although women are conditioned from childhood to worry about the rapist lurking in the bushes, they are actually four times more likely to be raped by a man they know than by a stranger,`` said Robin Warshaw, who published a book about acquaintance rape, ``I Never Called It Rape,`` in 1988.

In a new study released at the hearing, Mary Koss, a psychology and psychiatry professor at the University of Arizona Medical School, reported that one in seven of the women now in U.S. colleges have been raped and predicted that one in five American women will be raped during their lifetime. Koss` study found that more than four of five rape victims know their attackers, and among college rape victims, more than half were attacked by dates.

However, based on a study of working women in Cleveland and a nationwide survey of women at 32 colleges and universities, Koss concluded that rape is the most under-reported major crime, with only 7 percent of the victims reporting it to police. Fewer than 5 percent of college women report rapes to police, she contends.

The Judiciary Committee reported that only three of the estimated 1,275 rapes last year at the nation`s three largest universities (University of Minnesota, University of Texas and Ohio State University) were reported to police.

Warshaw testified that many women do not report rapes by men they know because they expect to be blamed for their actions by a society that

``believes men are justified, under certain circumstances, in forcing sex from women they know.``

She cited a survey of Rhode Island school children in which one-fourth of the boys and one-fifth of the girls said a man was entitled to force sex on a woman if he had spent $10 or more on her.

Biden`s bill, which has 20 Democrats and Republicans as co-sponsors, would double federal penalties for rape, earmark $300 million for law enforcement against sex crimes, authorize $25 million for courts and prosecutors to develop spouse-abuse units and make sex crimes a violation of individual civil rights.

Rape becomes a federal crime when committed on federal territory such as an Indian reservation. The bill would boost the maximum penalties for rape to 12 years from 6 years and for aggravated rape (criminal sexual assault that occurs in particularly grave situations such as kidnapping) to 18 years from 9 years.

Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and 38 other House members are sponsoring a similar measure.

Biden said he also would add provisions to increase funding for rape education in public schools, give new federal aid to rape crisis centers, create a federally funded college rape-education program and require university officials to notify rape victims about the outcome of disciplinary action against their attackers.

Koss urged that legislators also reform the way federal crime statistics measure the incidence of rape, contending that the Justice Department`s National Crime Survey greatly underestimates the problem. Faulty federal information ``creates a false picture of rape as an infrequent crime and, as a result, blunts societal concern about the extent to which American women are victimized,`` she said.